The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

By the time I was helping with a local youth group in 2017 (14 year olds) the very extroverted ringleader of the group was a proud "nerd", by which he meant that he and his friends loved to play video games like Fortnite and had an aversion to sports.

Take a look at the highest voted entries in Urban Dictionary [0]. Obviously this isn't a scientific measurement, but it shows a strong subculture of self-identified nerds who embrace the label to some degree.

Edit: here's another source [1] that you may find more credible, from 2012:

> And the appropriation of the word "nerd" was a "battle that got won", says [Neil] Gaiman. "It's like many terms that were originally intended to offend, the team that was offended took it as its own as a badge of honour.

> "It's part of a cycle, that terms of abuse are turned around - in this case it has been socially turned around."

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Nerd

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20325517

Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.

There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.

They certainly do. And I don't think we can make meaningful comparisons between individuals in terms of their problems, how they struggle or suffer, etc. For me personally, I don't assume to have it any worse than anyone else, and I always assume that others have deep challenges that I won't ever know about.

> Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical?

Again, these concepts become strained when applied to individuals. It's like the family who has 1.5 children: they don't exist. These are ever-changing labels that we make use of within an extremely nebulous social process. I try to apply them only in well-defined contexts and then throw up my hands in the general case.

> Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't?

I have no idea; in my mind this question is trying to peer closely into the nebula.

I am definitely biased, but whether I am blinded to real innovation or progress is something I think about all the time.

I think I would not be opposed to the self-promotion, marketing, and branding were it in support of some significant achievement or accomplishment. Unfortunately we have a culture that seems to think showering and getting dressed in the morning is a noteworthy event.

To use a more concrete example, I ran a project to upgrade a significant piece of software in our environment that had been neglected for some time. The project went well and I moved on to more interesting work. I had multiple people tell me that we should promote it, give talks about how it was done, pound our chest about how hard of a project it was, etc. I refused. In my mind it was a normal upgrade of a system we were responsible for and frankly was disgraceful that it was in such a bad state of deferred maintenance. There was no way I would be comfortable “taking credit” for doing what should have been done years ago.

Fast forward a few years and another team responsible for doing a similar project is giving multiple presentations all around the org and all the way up to the 2nd in command of the company. I’m like wow, maybe we should have taken the opportunity when we had it to pretend like we are superheroes for doing the bare minimum of our job and not having a vendor drop our support contract.